


Life Goes On

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Passage of time, Post SBURB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 15:08:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1351903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade Harley is a freshly unburdened genius. What will she do?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Goes On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seralica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seralica/gifts).



> A slight combination of two prompts, but more one than the other. Hope you enjoy!

“I’m ho-ome!” You trill as you walk back in to your simple three bedroom apartment, because that’s what it is to you. Home. The first home you’ve shared since you were six years old, because really, the spaceship didn’t count.

“Hello, Jade. How was your day?” Comes the polite, gravely voice of Roommate #1.

“It was great, Equius! I think I had a revelation on the handheld transportalizer. I think if we make the GPS updater manual instead of automatic it should stop it from short circuiting.”

“Excellent. I’ll make a note of that.” The troll goes back to what he was doing before you walked in - tinkering with the toaster sized box of wires and switches that composes your latest pet project. The deep slate bags peeking out from underneath Equius’s cracked shades are particularly pronounced; he must have been up all day working on the transportalizer in the troll equivalent of an all nighter. 

Despite making sharing living quarters inconvenient, having a nocturnal business partner increases productivity by at least 30%. It also helps that Equius is nothing short of a mechanical genius. You don’t hear the door open but you can smell the next person who walks in. 

“Dirk!“ You bark out, ears going haywire and flinging off your loose beanie as they waggle excitedly. You tackle him as he steps into the living room, throwing your arms around his neck and pulling him down to lick the side of the face. He skritches behind your ear and you nuzzle him affectionately. It just feels SO GOOD. “I figured something out!”

“What’s that you say, lassie. Jake’s stuck in the well again?”

“Aww, come on Dirk! You know Jake’s still kind of embarrassed by that. You don’t have to be a dick about it!” He sighs.

“Sadly I do.” Then he shakes his head like he’s an elderly republican hearing about an outbreak of homosexuals. “So what’s cooking in the Harl-o-Sphere?”

he raps lightly on your noggin a couple of times for good measure. 

“I think I figured out a way to fix the transportalizer. We just have to rewire the automatic GPS locator!”

“Oh shit, that could work couldn’t it?” He fist bunps you. 

“Yes!” 

“Hell yes.”

“Hell FUCKING yes.”

Your name is Jade Harley, and you are 18 years old.

* * * 

Your first year of classes at Stanford goes well - you share a great deal of classes with Dirk and Equius and between the three of your, your expertise in cutting edge machinery is unparalleled. Many of your professors express the sentiment that you don’t need to be working on a degree. Although you don’t need the education, you wouldn’t miss the college experience for the world.

During the day you attend classes and at night you go out with friends from school or stay in and work and either way you feel like you’ve never been happier. 

Money’s easy - you all support each other because it’s what you’ve always done and what you always will do, so even if you can’t make ends meet one of your friends will be there to close the distance. It’s a good life, and your happy. The kind of happy you had never known was possible. 

You get to quit your job at the computer repair store just off campus when you make your first million after figuring out a way to build completely successful bionic eyes for your recently blinded classmate. 

Life goes on.

* * * 

You are 22 and soaked with top dollar champagne. You’ve learned nothing in your life if not to invite John to any and all parties. After you protest that filling the entire pool with champagne would be too expensive (its not your money john!!! >:B) he compromised by popping the cork off a fresh bottle and dowsing you. 

“HELL YEAH HARLEY!” Shrieks Terezi as she jumps into John’s line of fire. “ME NEXT.” 

Your friends are all around you laughing and screaming and eating and kissing and hugging each other and before you know it you’re hoisted onto strong shoulders with a cry of ‘for she’s a jolly good fellow’ as they dump you into the luminescent blue water. At the edge of the pool a gigantic cardboard cutout of Time Magazine proudly displays you, Jade Harley, as person of the year. The youngest one ever named. 

“Could one woman’s dream revolutionize the world as we know it?”

These are the sort of things they say about you.

* * * 

You and Dirk and Jake and Roxy call your company Skaianet, like it was called by your ancestor long before and you set out to make the world a better place. You travel the world and visit every continent in the span of a few short years, seeing more beauty than you’d ever dreamed of. Buildings in Dubai so tall that they disappear into the clouds, and mud huts in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest. 

You get a new dog and name him Bec 2.

You fall in love with the planet and everyone on it. 

* * *

Clean water for every single human being. That’s what you and your colleagues promised in honor of Skaianet’s 20th anniversary. 

It’s been a long and expensive process but you didn’t build a new universe to let the people in it suffer! You sell your computers and transportalizers and mechanically enhanced limbs for a little bit more than you should, but in exchange you send your teams to the poorest parts of the world to build your patented Skaianet wells. Clean water, easy access, millions of lives saved. 

You get letters from adults, from children, from people of every age from every corner of the world thanking you and most importantly you get pictures, pictures of people who are smiling because of you and your work. 

You, Roxy, Jake, and Dirk are overseeing the ribbon cutting on the last pump today and you’ve never been more excited.

* * * 

It’s Christmas and the hearth in John’s house crackles warmly with cinnamon scented heat the same way it does year round, because a fireplace without a fire is like a Christmas morning without your family, which is to say IT COULD HARDLY BE CONSIDERED A TERRIBLY PROPER CHRISTMAS AT ALL. 

There aren’t presents because you all already have everything you need, but John and Jane cook and bake and the smell of food seeps into your clothes for the whole day. You’re not sure if anyone but you can pick up the subtler smells of happiness and love. Not everyone is blessed with your fantastic canine nose. 

You sing song. John sings well and Roxy’s voice is okay and Jake could shatter glass with his, but the alcohol assisted belting is too loud and passionate for any one voice to be made out. Half remembered lyrics to Auld Lang Syne blend in to off pace Silent Night (Jane cracks that Dave’s voice is so bad, he should be a Silent Knight) which melts into an accidental round of Baby, It’s Cold Outside. 

As it always does, life goes on.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies if it's a bit short, but I cut out some detail at the last moment that seemed a bit superfluous.


End file.
